Cog final: imagery

Mental Imagery:

ability to recreate perceptual experience  without the stimulus

• Can occur with stimuli you’ve never experienced

Dual coding theory:

There is non-verbal and verbal mental imagery

Non-verbal (dual coding)

analog DEPICTIVE codes from stim

verbal (dual coding)

symbolic codes about abstract concept info. no direct connect to features, DESCRIPTIVE

Epiohenomenon (verbal coding)

description of mental imagery- it is a by-product of the process of berbal coding- a hallucination that occurs when verbal codes are created, often resembling the original stimuli.

Evidence for depictive (non-verbal):

• mental scanning (kosslyn)

• Mental rotation

• mental scaling

Scanning: it takes longer to scan, process large mental images- evidence that it maintains spatial characteristics

Rotation: the more rotation the harder to identify- depictive

Scaling: close things look bigger, test asking someone to imagine a relatively small thing didn’t show specific details until the ‘mentally scaled’ it up- depictive of vision

Perky test (dim)

testing whether imagery uses the same mechanisms as perception (is it perception w out stim?) describe something while being shown dim image of it- ppl describes the image w the same features as image. This test demonstrates that mental imagery relies on the same visual processing as actual perception. Participants often report visual details that match the presented image, suggesting a shared cognitive mechanism.

Evidence against depictive (reed)

shape inside a shape is not always detected- there’s no depictive image just a descritpion, a name for the larger object.

Neuroimaging evidence (imagery)

Shares with perceptive mechanisms but not the same

effects of brain damage

• loss of occipitial and temporal lobes (important for vision) impair imagery. not always

• some ppl lose imagery w out sight

Mental health

disorders lead to negative imaging, imagery rescripting